Minimum
Wage Raise in increments is best
draftIV
I recently met a fellow who adamantly claims that
when minimum wages rise, prices for everything else will almost immediately
double. I think he should do a little fact-checking. First, companies generally
don’t want to drive themselves out of business. Prices for some businesses
where lots of workers will paid the new $12 an hour are more apt to raise their
charges by 5 to 10%, if at all.* Second; food, rent and utility costs didn’t
double in any of the other 29 states who raised their minimums.
*
It’s sad that, instead of determining ways to
encourage workers to use more empowerment, innovation, imagination and
teamwork, some employers in anticipation of the $12 raise are focusing their
energy on exaggerating how much this will hurt them, while looking to cut benefits, trim worker hours, and seek exceptions or loopholes. (I do agree
that an immediate $15 an hour would injure some companies.)
*
Indeed, it’s less of a societal failure when more of
our industry leaders realize that higher wages often translate into better worker
pride, stability and increased loyalty. Employers will be likely to see less
costly worker turnovers when their staff receives something approaching a
living wage. Maintaining experienced employees with institutional memories
saves on training costs, lessens work errors, reduces paperwork and makes for
improved work atmospheres.
*
Recently at my minimum wage workplace our paychecks
were delayed due to an accounting error. For some this may seem like a minor
nuisance, but for many of us, our anxiety level rose with the continuing uncertainty
of when we might be paid. Concerned work colleagues started canceling weekend
plans and worried about late charges for utilities, which affects credit
ratings. (Fortunately our checks showed up in the nick of time.)
*
Many people who have never experienced being absolutely
broke don’t realize how large a difference it is to have $300 versus owning next to nothing. Everything comes to a standstill.
Suddenly, fractured again, we don’t have enough to buy toothpaste and
Raman noodles, or we ponder for hours on our day off whether to do laundry or
save the coins for bus fare to work. The minimum wage raise will help immensely with
our efforts to get unstuck.
*
I think Gov. Wolf’s proposal to raise the wage to
$12 and then yearly 50 cent increments is right on track, considering that we’re experiencing a good economy;
that the wage has not kept up with the inflation of the last ten years, and
that this long overdue earned increase would give dedicated workers better
chances to flourish and shine for our companies and for ourselves and
families.
*References:
Something to keep in mind: while exteme poverty is worse than what a 1st world person could probably imagine,you have to also think about all the nuiances and costly omplications of first world living that go away in a poor 3rd world country.
ReplyDeleteMandatory health,rent,home owner, car (liability) insurances don't exist. Housing codes are not that good or not enforced well which means cheap housing (think huts for example) with no running water,plumbing,extensive electrical wiring,toilet and more is a lot cheaper than in a developed nation. People don't use microwaves,dish washers,laundry machines and similar convenient appliances. Bills are mostly limited to electricity and cellphone. Income tax is pretty much non-existent for people in extreme poverty. If you survive all the way to adulthood in extreme poverty you probably havr a well fortified immune system.
Things also cost what people are willing to pay for them. At least the bare neccesities will always be affordable to the majority,which means if there is extensive poverty in a certain area then food,used clothing,etc... Are affordable (albeit not of good quality).
My point is, a "day in the life" is probably a lot different than you might think. It's not so much that they struggle to pay rent,good healthcare or afford food (typical american poverty) but more like if they get sick for simple curable diseases they just die. Because they make so little,they can't afford to let the kids go to school at all after a certain age (the kids help) or even if they can they can't do homework or study with bad housing or lacking electricity and other tech. In many cases,kids walk really far to get to school (think 5+ miles). Nutrition is of course horrible.
The type of poverty you would experience in the US is different. You have food pantrys and emergency medical treatment is always available or at least you can get to a hospital within a few hours. Public libraries and relatively great public schools make raising a child a bit easier. In the US though,housing means a lot of complicated requirements,things cost a lot more,you feel a lot worse with what you lack which means the mental trauma is very high which in turn drives many to turn to easily accessible vices and crime trapping the person in a spiral of misery. Poverty is horrible wherever it happens and very tragically it persists in the west wearing a different mask.
Growing up in extreme povery and experiencing it after living in a 3rd world country are not comparable. When you grow up in a certain environment you accept certain realities(e.g.: I can't afford a 3rd meal and toilet paper vs I have to live in my car with my child because I got evicted ).
Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong
ReplyDeleteLast week, as world leaders and business elites arrived in Davos for the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates tweeted an infographic to his 46 million followers showing that the world has been getting better and better. “This is one of my favourite infographics,” he wrote. “A lot of people underestimate just how much life has improved over the past two centuries.”
Of the six graphs – developed by Max Roser of Our World in Data – the first has attracted the most attention by far. It shows that the proportion of people living in poverty has declined from 94% in 1820 to only 10% today. The claim is simple and compelling. And it’s not just Gates who’s grabbed on to it. These figures have been trotted out in the past year by everyone from Steven Pinker to Nick Kristof and much of the rest of the Davos set to argue that the global extension of free-market capitalism has been great for everyone. Pinker and Gates have gone even further, saying we shouldn’t complain about rising inequality when the very forces that deliver such immense wealth to the richest are also eradicating poverty before our very eyes.
It’s a powerful narrative. And it’s completely wrong.
There are a number of problems with this graph, though. First of all, real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981. Anything before that is extremely sketchy, and to go back as far as 1820 is meaningless. Roser draws on a dataset that was never intended to describe poverty, but rather inequality in the distribution of world GDP – and that for only a limited range of countries. There is no actual research to bolster the claims about long-term poverty. It’s not science; it’s social media.
What Roser’s numbers actually reveal is that the world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession that bulldozed people into the capitalist labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the colonisation of the global south.
Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place.
In other words, Roser’s graph illustrates a story of coerced proletarianisation. It is not at all clear that this represents an improvement in people’s lives, as in most cases we know that the new income people earned from wages didn’t come anywhere close to compensating for their loss of land and resources, which were of course gobbled up by colonisers. Gates’s favourite infographic takes the violence of colonisation and repackages it as a happy story of progress.
But that’s not all that’s wrong here. The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of $1.90 (£1.44) per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US in 2011. It’s obscenely low by any standard, and we now have piles of evidence that people living just above this line have terrible levels of malnutrition and mortality. Earning $2 per day doesn’t mean that you’re somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty. Not by a long shot.
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